Blogger to remove Publish via FTP

As I suspected some time ago, but at a much later time than I thought, Google is finally going to switch off the "Publish via FTP" option from Blogger (http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/2010/01/deprecating-ftp.html, http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/), causing much ranting on Twitter

The FTP feature was great, in that you got all the benefits of the Blogger editor interface, but all the files were published as flat files to a custom web server. Better still, you could cajole Blogger into saving the files as PHP, thereby providing a cunning integration with flat-HTML websites, without the use of a database or blogging software installed on the server.

Apparently, this caused Blogger a great deal of headache, particularly in resolving support incidents: only .5% of active blogs used FTP for publishing (although I bet all those were "real" blogs, rather than spam or SEO-drivers).

I think this means we'll need to install the blogging software on our servers, software such as WordPress (http://wordpress.org/). We need a mechanism which allows PHP scripts, so that the content can be embedded within the website itself, not hosted at some crummy http://blog.domain.com/ separate domain. This rules out the Google Custom Domain option.

Less than two months' notice is not great, but hopefully we should be able to improve on Blogger anyhow.

Verfiied by Visa Confirmed Dangerous

New research from the University of Cambridge supports the view that Verified by Visa is deeply flawed and unsafe. I first came across this mess of an implementation a while back, and the situation has only become worse since then:

the scheme has become a target for phishing, partly because inconsistent authentication methods can leave customers confused.

It's time to insist that Visa, MasterCard and other payment gateway providers take some responsibilty for this, and stop pushing risk onto the customer.